Recommended Posts

I'd like it if my test stations sent their test results to a web server. I'm wondering if anyone has done this. As I see it, I can probably do some port forwarding and expose a Maria/MySQL database over the internet or I could give that database a thin web interface and send the data over PUSH http requests. Are there pro/cons to one over the other? TLS is an option for either. Do you think HTTP would be more firewall friendly?

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

I don't know how secure the database itself would be when exposed to the internet. I suppose in theory it could be hardened, but theres a lot of surface area you have to understand. I'd lean towards a web server myself, as this lets you tightly restrict what you're going to let clients do. For encryption, I know the labview http client supports tls, and it looks like mysql does too, if configured. From labview you'd have to use the odbc/activex connector, since labview doesn't have built-in tls support (just the http client). Https is almost certainly more firewall friendly.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Never expose a database directly and always always use TLS or SSH tunnelling. Use certificate pinning wherever possible.

The preferred method is a web server to authenticate and then HTTPS or websockets depending on the type and frequency of data. The current trend is for web APIs which you can easily do in LabVIEW and insulates your software, somewhat, from SQL injection.

If you mean test data like "textual logs of stuff", then the common open source option would probably be elastic search https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch which Ive read and heard is hard to set up, but might be easy enough if you use bitnami: https://bitnami.com/stacksmith which is how I exclusively set up anything I want to use that consists of more than a single executable. Docker might also be an option in that realm.

Edit: Just because, I thought I'd google "test result storage database" and it came up with this: https://maintainable.com ...for a cloud based company their website is odd. But, they have a bullet point: "Integrates with industry software like NI TestStand".